Andrew Ramer is not as widely known in the queer world as he deserves to be. His book "Two Flutes Playing" is an early classic of queer spirituality gives voice to the inner truths many gay men experience
but have never had language for. And like many endeavors that give new language to experience, it is often a language of myth and metaphor. In his spiritual view of gaydar, he explains the phenomenon as a vibrational tuning that allows queer men to find each other.
When I first met Andrew I didn't know anything about this book — or the book he co-wrote that was a "new age" best seller in the 90s. We found each other at a seminar in upstate New York being taught by Drs. Gay & Kathlyn Hendricks in Body Oriented Psychotherapy and Conscious Relationship. We were the two queer jews in the room, so we shared a particular point of view of the proceedings (and while that sounds like we were judgmental it is more a statement of the outsider p.o.v. that jews bring to almost every situation we find ourselves in). I had introduced myself to the group as a red-headed, left-handed queer Jewish Buddhist from New York. Andrew spoke of himself as a Judeo-Pagan — and if I thought being a Jubu was a radical thing, Andrew blew me away with his boundary crossing transgressive approach to experiencing the divine.
As I began my journey into the world of traditional Jewish storytelling, Andrew in his traditional way wrote some very unusual stories about dybbuks, angels and rabbis. When he shared some of them with me I began to add them to my performance repertory. To this day I don't understand why his collection, "Rivkah's Sewing Machine," has never found a publisher.
Andrew was one of the co-founders of the Gay Spirit Visions conference that takes place yearly in North Carolina, and has been a key speaker there almost every year for the last 18 years. If you can imagine a conference that has the flavor of the radical faeries, with somewhat more organization, that's GSV. I've enjoyed every time I've gone and I would never have found it if I hadn't known Andrew. I'll never forget the year he taught this group of mostly lapsed Southern Baptists who have gone pagan about the Talmudic story of the Oven of Achne. He is someone who manages to hold together what appears to be an extraordinary range of contradictions in a living Zen koan.
Those Hendricks' seminars were in the mid 90s, but we've kept in touch. Andrew's writing was one of the inspirations for my creating the Stonewall Seder, and some of his writing appeared in the first version of this liturgy in 1996. Ten years later, when he reworked that liturgy for use at Congregation Sh'ar Zahav in San Francisco with Joss Eldredge, which in turn influenced the latest version of the liturgy used at Congregation B'nai Jeshurun this year.
Andrew writes a column, "Praxis," for the gay men's spirituality journal, "White Crane." And he is about to publish "Queering the Text: Biblical, Medieval, and Modern Jewish Stories."
Of course there is a reason Andrew isn't as well known as I believe he ought to be. His activism is inner activism, a transgressive search for the divine everywhere. That's too much of a challenge for most of us.
And that challenge he puts before us is one reason he's one of my queer jubu heroes (though he'd never call himself a buddhist!).
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